Trump’s Teeter Totter
Or - Never Get Involved In a Trade War With China In what could only have been predicted by... anybody, the stock market took a dump in response to Trump's announcement of $60B worth of tariffs on Chinese goods, and the resultant fears of a brewing trade war. Some...
Preserving The Problem
Consider this adage, from writer Carl Shirky: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Now, consider the laundry list of social problems that have lingered for decades, despite the best efforts of big government, advocacy groups,...
Declaring Themselves Unfit?
For the third or fourth time since the Parkland shooting, a story about some "moral high ground" gun owner handing his AR-15 over to the police has crossed my social media news feeds. I get that this is an empty gesture intended as virtue-signal theater, but I'm going...
Inconvenient Events
A school shooting incident in Maryland splashed across the national news this morning. As is now the norm, it got reported across many platforms in near-real-time, with vague early information eventually giving way to concrete facts. At the time of this writing, it...
Better That You Die…
Liberty lovers found a kernel of positivity in Trump's 2018 State of the Union address in his support for legislation allowing terminally ill patients the "right to try" experimental treatments. The embedded principle is controversial (obviously, else it would be law...
Defending Ignorance
I read a new word today. "Gunsplaining." If you're a pro-gun-rights type who's engaged in any degree of debate, you immediately know what it means. But, for everyone else, put simply, it's a derisive description of the act of correcting someone who makes anti-gun...
The Left’s Christianity Problem
A few weeks ago, "The View" co-star Joy Behar mocked Vice President Mike Pence's Christian beliefs, and in particular the idea that God speaks to him: "It’s one thing to talk to Jesus, it’s another thing when Jesus talks to you. ... That’s called mental illness, if...
Olympic Perfidy – Once And Again
Consider the Bible's Matthew Effect, often interpreted as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." At first this would seem unchristian, hardly of the same school as "the meek shall inherit the earth." Seen through the lens of life experience, though, the...
Bad Laws
Many years back, I took an quiz (in the pre-Internet days) that gauged political sophistication. One of the quiz's questions was whether I agreed with the statement "The law is the law." As I recall, it seemed a bit stark and jarring in comparison to most of the other...
Peddling Misery
A sorta-provocative headline at the Washington Post, "It's Time to Give Socialism A Try," made me a bit cranky this morning. Having seen this sort of sentiment more times than I can count, I've developed a standard first response, along the lines of "aren't 200...
Conservatives Defending Trade Wars?!
A week or so after Trump's election, I wrote a list of hopes and fears for his presidency. Of the dozen hopes I listed, Trump actually managed to fulfill six and initiate two more in his first year. On the fears side, he didn't "succeed" in actuality, but he did make...
Trump’s Deck of Victim Cards
In a move that further roiled an already-jittery stock market, President Trump announced substantial tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, supposedly in the name of national security. The assertion is risible, but it makes for great theater for the protectionists...
Public Unions, Running Scared
Public unions appear to be in a cold sweat over this week's Supreme Court case, Janus vs AFSCME, Council 31, a case that focuses on whether an employee can be forced to pay dues to a union. Current law in some states mandates that a non-union employee that's covered...
Gun Rights Lesson #247 – Minimum Age
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is one of a series of articles on gun rights. Each addresses a common anti-gun trope. "The Parkland school shooter was only 19! You should be 21 years old in order to buy a gun!" It is correctly observed that anecdotes are not data, and that single...
Where’s the Accountability?
The public debate - at least what passes for debate in 2018 - over the Parkland school shooting and what to do about it, continues to evolve. Responses (I won't call them solutions, because most of them won't make a hill-of-beans difference to the next madman) focused...
Bootstrapping and Freeloading
This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case regarding mandatory union dues (Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31), a case that should, if decided in the direction of liberty, extend right-to-work rules...
Braying Over Bitcoin
As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rise out of their initial status as nerd novelty, public discussion has increased to where seemingly everyone has an opinion. Most fascinating to me among all the opinions I see are those that denounce Bitcoin. "It's a bubble."...
Mass Shootings – What Should We Do?
Part 2 Of A Two-Part Look At the Parkland Mass Shooting My first post about the Parkland shooting focused underlying societal sickness that feeds the sort of deranged minds capable of planning and perpetrating such an atrocity. I concluded that a societal shift, and...
Normalizing Hate and Exalting Victimhood
Part 1 Of A Two-Part Look At the Parkland Mass Shooting Another horrific school shooting. Followed, as usual, by instant outrage, virtue signaling, finger-pointing, and "do-something" demands, all before facts and circumstances become known. Some scream at the sky,...
Gun Rights Lesson #900 – Gun Rights, Self Defense, and the Ninth Amendment
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is one of a series of articles on gun rights. Advocacy for gun rights typically involves invoking the Constitution's Second Amendment, which reads: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people...
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